Can forum categories be a slug directly after the .com/ for example vanillaforums.com/mycategoryname

TownFish

I'd like to have 2 core categories of my forum for posts which are:

Questions
Discussions

And then I'd like to have sub categories within these such as General, Home, Entertainment, etc

My ideal URL's would look like this:

www.mywebsite.com/questions
www.mywebsite.com/discussions

and when a category within these discussions was clicked on it would look like:

www.mywebsite.com/questions/mycategory

At the moment it is looking like this:

www.mywebsite.com/categories/questions
www.mywebsite.com/categories/discussions/mycategory

Is there anyway to get the URL's how I want them?

TownFish

I'm also looking to run both Questions and Discussions from the main header menu which is why this is important, ideally I don't want to have a www.mywebsite.com/categories/ before /questions and /discussions

R_J

From time to time people start asking "can I change url from this to that", but it is quite complicated and I would avoid it by all means, even if you can find some who can offer a solution for that.

You could let link /questions to /categories/questions if you like to, but that doesn't make sense at all. People click your links, they don't write them.

But to be honest, I haven't really understood which advantages you see in changing that links...

TownFish

Hi @R_J thanks for your reply, I'm actually trying to go from /categories/questions to /questions

The main reason for this is length and how the are seen by users in google, i just want to remove the parent slug /categories because otherwise it will be:

www.mywebsite.com/categories/questions/morecategories/the-name-of-the-question-headline

So you can see how the it would be much better both from a length perspective and an seo perspective if it could be:

www.mywebsite.com/questions/morecategories/the-name-of-the-question-headline

R_J

If you have SEO concerns, I think you should do some test. Open google.com and search for "site:google.com -feedproxy category". Instead of "category" you can choose any other word. You will only see links that are in any way related to google. There are a lot of cryptic monster urls in the search results:

http://code.google.com/p/blockly/issues/detail?id=226
https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/business/n230qLsfz8k
https://support.google.com/trustedstoresmerchant/answer/6063071?hl=en
https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/java/javadoc/com/google/appengine/api/datastore/Category
https://www.google.com/analytics/partners/company/6049086432083968/gadp/5629499534213120/app/5066549580791808/listing/5154321532452864

If anyone knows about how to optimize for search engines, than it is Google Inc. So, if Google doesn't care about having links like the above, why do you think it would have influence your rank if strip out "/categories"?

R_J

But not too long ago @hgtonight‌ showed how to replace "profile" with "p". That could be the best solution for you, too.

TownFish

Yes that would be great for profile pages just having a /p i'll look into that do you happen to know where the post is?

I can also see how the url breaks down, /discussions relates to all types of posts and the questions plugin becomes a category within discussions so it has to have /categories before it